When only seven people come to the Theatre des Marionettes in Paris, puppeteer Tony Malatini visits the theater on the corner to see why crowds are attracted to his competitor. After viewing a performance by the popular dancer Suzanne, whose decisions are all made by her manager, called the Baron, Tony secretly meets Suzanne backstage and gets her permission to make a puppet based on her. The Baron, who imperially proclaims “I am Suzanne,” finds Tony there, and after castigating Suzanne, threatens to turn her free. Terrified of being on her own, Suzanne quickly agrees to marry the Baron if he will stay with her. During her performance, Suzanne goes into the audience and Tony implores her not to marry the Baron. Greatly upset, Suzanne falls into the orchestra pit and injures herself. Weeks later, as the prognosis on whether she will dance again is pessimistic, the Baron prepares to make another dancer into a star. Tony convinces a doctor to help Suzanne, and as she goes through a vigorous exercise program with Tony’s assistance, she also learns to be a puppeteer. They become close, and Tony explains his somewhat unusual attitude towards his puppets: they are his true friends, he says, he talks to them and still reveres the puppet of his first love, a chorus girl. When he then tells Suzanne resignedly that he will still have the puppet he has made of her when she leaves him, she is perplexed. After Suzanne is able to walk again, Tony kisses her, but immediately apologizes. Although confused and jealous of Tony’s puppet of her, Suzanne helps Tony put on a vastly successful show with puppets look like celebrities, but when Tony, during a celebration, has his puppets announce that he is going to marry Suzanne, she forcefully states “I am Suzanne!” and says that she will no longer be anyone’s puppet. She then shoots the puppet that resembles her. Although broken in spirit, Suzanne goes back to dancing for the Baron, and Tony’s show faces failure. After a theatrical manager hires both Tony’s puppets and Suzanne for a show in which they will compete against one another, Suzanne, who cannot dance because of her mental anguish, has a dream in which the puppet community puts her on trial as an unbeliever. She wakes as she is being strangled in a spider’s web and then apologizes to Tony, saying that she did not mean to hurt the puppets. Tony confesses his love for Suzanne and vows to show the world that a puppet is nothing but a lump of wood. Their combined show, in which Suzanne’s puppet transforms into Suzanne, is a huge success. More on Wikipedia or Mubi
Watch I Am Suzanne (1933)
